The increased participation of women in the workforce, including last-mile accessibility to work and skills, has been a serious concern in India. Especially given the vastness of India, it is a big challenge for the authorities and companies to extend support to the remote areas.
Addressing this, during a session titled How AI Is Reshaping Work for Women at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, panellists expressed their views.
Talking about the skilling opportunities for women, Atul Satija, of The/Nudge Institute, said, “If you look at the government, there are about 22 schemes which are offering digital skills to women. These schemes cover a lot, from rural development to social justice to ministries, touching specific communities in various ways.”
However, he added that the challenge is that all those skilling initiatives are creating a skilled section of society who are not in work. “None of them actually have the last mile connection to the job. So you see a huge amount of skilling not leading to better employment. If we have to solve for this, we have to take work where women are,” he furthered.
Adding to this, Mythily Ramesh of NextWealth said, “With AI, people fear that jobs will be lost due to automation. While in the short term, it is probably going to automate a lot of the work that is done today, I think in the long term, the volumes are really going to go up. There are going to be a lot of new use cases and newer areas that are going to come up. Therefore, the volume of jobs is actually going to go up. We believe that the next 100 million jobs are going to be generated in this space.”
But such possibilities for a country like India need ample government support for realisation. Drawing on these lines, M M Tripathi of NIELIT, said, “Under MeitY, this is an institution, which is present in every state with 56 centres spread across the country. And we skill 10 lakh people every year, 1 million every year, and naturally, 40% of whom are women.”
Further talking about the ministry’s efforts to strengthen women in the last mile, he said that the institution caters to the needs of those people who are from disadvantaged sections.
“Also, we don’t charge any fees from the poor students, so it’s free, and these qualifications are of very good quality,” he added.
But empowerment of women with digital skills doesn’t just confine to the IT sector or so. It means a holistic approach towards the skilling of women. The majority of the Indian landmass being under agricultural practices, digital skilling for enhanced farming techniques is a significant step towards the upliftment of women in the rural areas.
On this, Jona Repishti of Digital Green, which is an agritech app, said that the company uses generative AI for communicating with the farmers using the app. She said that the app has a network of frontline workers who connect with the farmers. But the ratio being 1:1000, women farmers are even more neglected.
“And when advice does reach women, it actually doesn’t often work for the situations that they’re in. So when we decided to build Farmer Chat, our AI advisor,” she added. According to her, the women users have reported feeling more secure and more capable, in terms of the type of innovations that they can do on their farms.
These reflect that having women digitally skilled isn’t the solution. The challenge is met properly only when they are financially empowered with those skills.
